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an archive of content from ≈ 2005 - 2015, relating to international business, translation, freelancing, and working online.

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Day 6: Pick One Platform

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Today's SYS Challenge: Pick One Platform #socialtranslator

Today’s SYS Challenge: Pick One Platform #socialtranslator

Do you take a spray and pray approach to social media?

You know, you open accounts on every up-and-coming platform, then blast out updates and/or connection requests across them all (or at least, the main ones), whenever you can?

(Don’t worry, this isn’t a trick question. Blog posts that open with trick questions always put me off!).

There’s nothing wrong with this approach.

In fact, I’m certain many a successful business has been built off the back of it.

But today, seeings as this is a challenge and all, I’m going to suggest giving that approach a break.

Today, I’d like to see you give all your love to just one platform.

One platform, 100% focus

Ideally, you’d pick that one that might best help you meet your goals.

But really, you can pick any – the one you love the most, the one you dread the most. All that matters is that you pick one.

Now, study that platform. Look at it under a microscope. Roll up your sleeves and dig in deep. Put your ear to the ground and listen closely.

Here’s how:

  • Who does your buyer persona follow on that platform? These may not be the most popular accounts, but they are the most important ones as far as you are concerned. Let’s call them “influencers”.
  • What do these influencer profiles look like? Their images, the words they use?
  • What content do these influencers share, and when?
  • How do your target buyers interact with these influencers, if at all?
  • When and how are your target buyers active on this platform?
  • What other platform-specific language or communication conventions can you spot? You’re a translator, this part should be easy! And fun 🙂
  • Make sure your account details are up-to-date.
  • Rewrite your profile, keeping in mind the buyer persona who is most likely to see your profile (i.e. the marketing manager or assistant). Remember that the profile you write when you’re looking for an inhouse position shouldn’t be the same as the one you’d write when you’re selling your services. Frame everything you do or say in terms of how it translates into value for your buyer persona. In other words, how can you help them be successful in the eyes of the people THEY answer to? ‹
  • Take the time to learn all the ins and outs of the platform. Does it have analytics or other forms of tracking? How does it work? What about advertising? And what does that little button there do? Now’s your chance to find out.

Now, make that one platform the centre of your social media efforts for a specified period of time, and see what happens.

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Day 5: Measure What Matters

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Measure what matters.

Today’s SYS Challenge: Set Your Metrics, Measure What Matters #socialtranslator

  • How do you really know if your time on social media is well spent?
  • How can you truly tell if your strategy is working for you?
  • How do you decide when it’s worth spending your hard-earned cash on a software upgrade, assistant, or other forms of support for your online marketing?

The answer to all of these questions is the same:

Look to your metrics.

Metrics are meaningful data points that measure your progress towards your stated goals.

The beauty of online marketing these days is that you can find data relating to just about anything.

Hello, analysis paralysis 🙂

The trick with metrics is figuring out what you want to measure and why it is meaningful for you.

You do this by asking: What insight or action is it going to lead to? 

If the answer is a blank look or a shrug, then don’t bother tracking it. It’s probably just a vanity metric.

By the way, this explains why “naked” numbers, like a count of your followers, mentions, or shares, are meaningless. Because they don’t – on their own – tell you what to do next.

But which metrics matter?

Of course, the hard part is, no-one can really tell you what metrics you should track track with any certainty.

Only you can work out what matters, because only you know what you are aiming for.

If you know where you’re headed, you know what to track – Jay Baer @jaybaer (marketing consultant extraordinaire)

However, I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here if I say that, for most translators, our aim is to have the work we do on social media lead to a paying client.

And there’s nothing wrong with that. Yay to paying clients 🙂

But bear in mind that there are quite a few steps between your social media account and your checkout process.

This is why it makes sense to think about a couple of other key measurements along your sales funnel. (See how this all fits together?!)

An example

One way to give context to your numbers is to cross-reference your traffic with your conversions to see which activities result in the most potential growth for your business.

So, for example, a post to your Facebook page might have a low number of views (traffic), but a high number of those viewers click through to your website (conversion).

This would make it a lot more valuable than a tweet which might have a high number of views or retweets (traffic), but end up with a low number of people clicking through to your website (conversion).

I’ve picked a website view as a conversion here as for most of us, our websites are a key driver of leads into our sales funnel.

(Kevan Lee explains this example in more detail in his post on goal setting strategies: see #7).

Give it a whirl: choose one or two meaningful metrics, and see how it goes.

Further reading

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Day 4: Understand Your People – Really!

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How to truly understand your buyers using buyer personas (blog)

SYS Day 4: How to truly understand your buyers – and find more of them!

We’re still on ideal buyers today, translators, but I promise a change of topic tomorrow!

The reason our buyers warrant so much time and energy is because if you’re clear on who they are, I believe your social media planning will be a walk in the park.

My experience

Once I’d found my first translation client, I found it very easy to find more. I just found out all I could about them and their business (in as non-stalkerish a way as possible), and used that as a springboard to finding more clients just like them. It was like it had a strange snowball effect.

Over time, I was able to gradually change my client base in an intentional way by playing around with the variables of my “prototype client”. Sometimes it took longer than I wanted, but in the end, it almost always worked.

In hindsight, I realise that what I was actually doing was creating and working from buyer personas.

The great news is, buyer personas are an actual marketing Thing that anyone can use to great effect!

Personas for Translation Buyers

Personas are a very useful sales and marketing tool that can help you truly understand your ideal buyer and be clear on exactly where and how to use social to speak to them.

The way they work is this:

  1. You draw from fact, fiction, or a little bit of both, to come up with a detailed description of a well-rounded character – in this instance, your ideal buyer. You can give this character a name, photo or whatever you need to make it as real to you as you possibly can.
  2. Each time you tweet, blog or address your target audience in any way, you imagine addressing this one individual and let that guide all subsequent decisions.
  3. Voilà. You’ve got yourself a full book of clients.

The result of targeting this one specific persona is you’re more likely to craft a message that resonates with the very many real people who have some of the same characteristics as your persona.

It’s also a lot easier to sit down and write when you have one specific person in mind, rather than a vague amorphous crowd of maybe clients.

So how do I create a persona?

There are myriad templates online that you could use as a basis for creating your persona. I’ll include links to some below that might be particularly useful for translators.

Bear in mind that in an ideal world, you’d create a separate persona to represent each of the roles involved in your buying process. This is a situation often faced by translators, which can make it particularly tricky to define our ideal buyers in the first place.

But none of us live in an ideal world, so I recommend starting with baby steps and creating just one to begin.

For example, if you know that typically, a marketing assistant usually conducts the initial search for a translator and then presents a shortlist to their marketing manager for final approval, then that’s two personas right there.

These two individuals enter the buying process at different stages and have different needs and concerns, so you need to engage with them in different ways to address that.

(Hint: this is where you may find that social media is a better way to reach out to some personas more than others. That’s fine too – at least you know you’re not wasting your time).

Finally, here are a few ideas on how you can use social media to gather information from your existing, favourite and/or ideal clients to flesh out your personas:

  • Use the free tool Followerwonk to analyse the Twitter accounts of your ideal buyers. Look at the results to draw conclusions, such as the following:
    • Lots of @replies? They’re chatty, at least in social terms.
    • RTs?  They’re listeners. Who are they listening to?
    • Do many people share their content? They have an engaged community of followers, if so. Who are their followers?
    • When are they most frequently online?

… And so on. Add these deets into your buyer persona.

  • Facebook Custom Audiences has a tool called a Lookalike Audiences. Basically, it generates a list of people who are similar to a list of people that you define. There are lots of ways you could use this, some creepy, some less so. (Remember, this is all based on publicly available information.) Here’s a non-creepy example:
    • Start with a list of some of your existing or ideal clients. Ask Facebook to generate a list of similar people for you. Check out these people’s publicly available Facebook profiles, and use the information you glean as inspiration when you’re fleshing out your Buyer Personas.
  • Use Rapportive, the email tool I described yesterday, to find out more about your existing buyers and again, use this as inspiration for your Buyer Personas.

So, Buyer Personas – worth a shot, no?

Further Reading

  • How to Create Detailed Buyer Personas for Your Business, by Pamela Vaughn at Hubspot Blogs. A solid article with a free template – more information than most translators will ever need but still some nuggets, so pull out a couple of things that interest you then move on. Don’t get bogged down! 🙂
  • 4 Questions Answered About Buyer Personas, by Barbra Bago at the Content Marketing Institute. Nice list of characteristics here.
  • MakeMyPersona.com by Hubspot. A handy dandy tool that will take you through some questions and spit out a persona for you at the end 🙂

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Day 3: Design your sales funnel

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Today's SYS Challenge: set social goals #socialtranslator

Today’s SYS Challenge: design your funnel #socialtranslator

Yesterday was about understanding the buyer’s journey. Today is about understanding your sales funnel, and linking it to your social strategy.

In other words, same thing but from a different angle 🙂 But one that’s still worth pursuing, so bear with me.

So what’s a sales funnel, and why does it matter to me as a translator?

Your sales funnel charts the process you take your customers through before they buy from you.

But instead of looking at the customer experience, it focusses more on the volume of customers in each stage.

Hence a funnel, representing the natural drop-off in the number of potential customers you have moving through each stage until they emerge as buyers from the spout at the bottom.

Yes, this is just another marketing metaphor. But it’s one I think is particularly useful for translators, particularly in the context of social. Here are two reasons why:

First, the funnel shape represents the kind of content a potential buyer might find useful, depending on the stage they are at.

Broader and more general at the top of the funnel, more detailed and specific as they reach the pointy end.

You can target your social media interactions to reflect this and to help move people through the funnel.

Second, and more importantly, looking at your sales process in this way can help you diagnose and fix business issues before they occur.

This can help prevent the feast-or-famine situation freelancers so often fret about.

Here are the kind of questions you can ask yourself to do that:

  • How many leads do I have in my funnel right now?
  • What is the total potential value of each deal in my funnel?
  • How long does it take, on average, for leads to move through my funnel to a sale?
  • What can I do to bring more potential customers into the top of the funnel?
  • What am I doing to pull leads toward the bottom of the funnel?
  • Are they getting stuck at any point in the funnel? What can I do to clear the blockage, if so?
  • Am I spending my time and energy where it matters?

A sound social strategy is what keeps your potential buyers engaged as they work their way down your funnel.

It’s also how you can ensure the right content appears in front of the right people at just the right time.

An example

Matching your sales funnel to your social strategy doesn’t have to be complicated or time consuming.

For example, a couple of years ago I started using a free Gmail plugin called Streak to classify my email enquiries from inside my email account, based on their stage in my sales funnel. It was simple to set it up just how I wanted it, and it was incredibly easy to maintain as it was right there in my inbox, all the time.

Streak allows you to sort your emails into your sales funnel from within Gmail, using parameters of your choosing (see box on right, above).

Each day, I was able to just log in and see who I needed to follow up with, and to what end.

What Streak looks like in Gmail: it allows you to sort your emails directly into a sales funnel of your choosing. Based on this, I could make decisions on where to better invest my time.

Combined with the free Gmail plugin Rapportive, I was able to make sure I was connected to my prospects on any relevant social channels too. So when it came time to follow up or touch base, it was easy to select the channel that was most appropriate based on the kind of outreach I was aiming for.

This is what the Rapportive plugin looks like, also in the sidebar of Gmail. It automagically pulls detailed contact info into your email account to give more context to your interactions, including most recent Tweet, etc. (Note this is not a client – this is my partner. He couldn’t afford a hallowed spot in my sales funnel :)).

Best of all, over time, I was able to spot very strong patterns in the kind of enquiries that were likely to lead to a sale. Even after several years of freelancing at that point, there were still some surprises.

As a result, I was able to make sound decisions on where I should be spending my time and energy.

Of course, this system may not work for you, and that’s fine. But hopefully it will give you some ideas on how you might link up your own sales and social strategies.

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Day 2: Know Your Customers

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Today's SYS Challenge: Get to know your buyers #socialtranslator

Today’s SYS Challenge: Get to know your buyers #socialtranslator

Most of us use social media to connect with our peers, and rightly so. There are lots of benefits to this, and it’s relatively easy because we can imagine who we are reaching out to.

Before ever having met them, we can picture the kind of educational experiences they’re likely to have had, we can make an educated guess about the kinds of things they might enjoy, and the ups and downs of their working days don’t seem so far from our own. We can use this knowledge to find them, reach out, and build a connection of sorts. 

Reaching out to those who use our services can be quite a different experience though, so that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

Using Social To Understand Your Buyer’s Journey

It’s hard for us as translators to walk a mile (kilometre?) in our buyer’s shoes. Hiring a translator to buy a translation service is a relatively niche purchase.

Most people who can read will buy a book. Many people who have toilets will hire a plumber. Some people who have businesses will hire an accountant. But relatively speaking, very, very few people ever hire a translator.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this.

Except that it makes it difficult to imagine our buyers with the same level of detail as our peers. And this makes it very difficult to chart their buyer’s journey.

This is problematic in lots of ways:

  • When we don’t understand the steps clients have taken to find us, we can’t make sure we’re appearing in the right places in order to be found.
  • When we don’t understand our clients’ true needs, we can’t craft our marketing message so we stand out from the crowd (remember: quality doesn’t matter).
  • When we don’t understand our clients’ pain points, we can’t offer them the best possible service.
  • When we don’t understand exactly how and why our client needs us, we can’t offer them the kind of value that makes us a trusted supplier instead of a replaceable transaction.
    • … I could go on, but it’s late here Down Under and I think you get the drift 🙂

All this, ultimately, makes it hard for us translators to find our soulmate-clients online, to reach out, and to build a connection of sorts.

And of course, a core tenet of networking is that people do business with people they know, like and trust.

My experience

I’ve worked almost exclusively with direct clients throughout my translation career. Online marketing played a huge role in  enabling me to do this.

To make my marketing as effective as possible, I learned how to carefully map out the stages my ideal client went through before hiring me. I then figured out ways to effectively meet their needs at different stages of this process. I realised that for my clients, buying translation services was a complex sale which comes with its own unique set of challenges and concerns. What worked for sellers of books, plumbing or even accountancy services would not work for me.

I’m the first to admit this wasn’t the easiest of marketing processes, and I certainly didn’t do it perfectly. But it worked surprisingly well and more than one client commented that they had seen very few other translators put themselves out there the way I did. (I don’t think that’s necessarily true by the way, but that perception certainly worked in my favour).

I believe all translators can benefit from having a better understanding of their clients’ buying cycles. And social platforms offer us an excellent venue to do just that.

So what can we do?

Here are a couple of platform-agnostic  tools we can use to get a better understanding of our ideal clients and the steps they are likely to go through before they hire us. Apply them to your platform of choice and see what happens:

  • Hashtags and keywords: seek out the kind of industry events your ideal clients are likely to attend over the year and follow related hashtags or keywords on Twitter and other relevant platforms. Use this as a starting point for understanding the movers and shakers, key influencers, hot topics, and so on. Look out for events, questions or other actions that may indicate a client is in the process of considering translation services. For example, mentions of trade shows, retweets around certain topics, requests for recommendations about speakers of other languages, or even questions about Google Translate. You can use these events as the starting point for a specific outreach campaign, or at least as a starting point for finding other potential buyers
  • Lists: most social media platforms allow you to build lists or subgroups of people you can follow. Create a specific subgroup for your ideal customers, check in to it regularly and add or subtract to it as you learn more about your prospects and the kind of people who are likely to benefit from your services. This list should not be static – constantly prune and refine the type of prospect you include on this list based on your growing understanding of your ideal client.
  • Website analytics: use your analytic tool to figure out who is coming to your website, and how they are finding you. Line this up alongside your ideal client. Where are the gaps? How can you fill them in to move from your current client list to your ideal one (assuming they are different).

Remember: the point here isn’t to find someone with their mouse hovering over the “Buy”, and jump in front of them shouting, “Hire me! Hire me!”. The point is to figure out the steps people realistically go through that build up to them becoming your customer.

Only then can you really create the best possible online experience around that for them. And that is what will get them to hire you.

Further reading

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A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in October, I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Day 1: Get Clear on Your Goals

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Today's SYS Challenge: set social goals #socialtranslator

Today’s SYS Challenge: set social goals #socialtranslator

I’ve never spent masses of time on social media. When my income is based on my output, as it is for many translators, I need to be certain that time spent on anything other than wordsmithing is going to be worth it.

The best way to do that is to be clear on my goals before I ever fire up Facebook.

When you’re clear on what you want to achieve from social from a business standpoint, your online activities can be more focussed.

It seems a lot of us go about our social strategy backwards: we pick technologies or platforms first, before getting clear on what we really want to accomplish.

It’s a lot easier to decide where to invest your energies when you view everything through the lens of “Is this going to get me closer to or further away from my stated goal?”.  When the answer is yes, you do it. When it’s no, you don’t. When you have a choice of activities to select from, you pick the one that is most likely to move you furthest in the right direction.

It really can be as simple and as complicated as that.

Having clear goals for social has also helped me resist the urge to tinker, fiddle around “just because”, and ascribe meaning to what I’ve done after the fact. For example, “I can clock that last hour up to professional development because I learned how NOT to go about designing a Twitter background!”.

I love learning for learning’s sake just as much as the next person, but let’s be honest: that’s a hobby, not a business activity. (And making time for hobbies is a whole ‘nother issue!)

Examples of goals

From my reading on this topic (see further reading, below), it seems goals relating to online marketing tend to fall into one of three categories:

  1. Building your brand
  2. Driving conversions
  3. Increasing your presence

For the best results, sources agree you need to formulate your goal so it’s super specific. If your goal fits in all three of the above categories, for example, then it’s probably too broad.

My goal for social is to get in the routine of publishing content again. That’s it. This challenge is a way for me to do that.

Of course, it’s easy to get caught up in the reasons why you can’t reach your online goals. Especially as a translator, when you may be considering international audiences, business-to-business markets, or other such variables. But you still need to start somewhere, and that’s where simple and focussed comes in. For me, it’s as much about building momentum as it is about achieving the goals I set myself.

Shooting an arrow at a target is no guarantee you’ll hit the bulleye. But without a target, the only guarantee is that you’ll never hit it at all.

I know which odds I’d rather be playing.

[tweetable hashtags=”#socialtranslator”]We can all find 15 mins a day for online marketing. This is how you ensure those 15 mins make a difference.[/tweetable] (click to tweet).

So, go set yourself some goals for social!

Further reading

  • Kevin Lee at Buffer has an excellent post on goal setting as it relates to social media, inlcuding several different ways of formulating goals for business purposes. If you read only one article on this topic, make it this one.
  • Marketo has some great examples of social media goals (pdf) broken down by platform in their free social media action plan.
  • Charles Ngo has an interesting article on goal setting in general if you’d like more info on the benefits associated with that.

—–

A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday in OctoberI’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Translators: Sort Your Social! (A Challenge)

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My social media marketing is due some TLC. Follow along in October as I get it sorted!

My social presence is pretty shabby at the moment. My Twitter is hit and miss, there are tumbleweeds rolling through my Facebook page, and frankly, all the mismatched graphics hurt my eyeballs.

It’s time to apply the Sarah Dillon brand of social spring clean 😉

This is a system for my online marketing that I’ve followed for about 2 years. It works for a couple of reasons.

First, because it’s important to me and my business that I have a strong online presence. All my new business comes to me this way. Second, because I hate, HATE scattering my attention across a million things at once. It feels unproductive, and it wears me out. Ain’t no-one got time for that. (And social media can VERY like that.)

In other words, I like to have my cake and eat it too.

Here’s how I do it.

I set aside some time to give my social media a re-haul. During this time, I focus 100% of my time that’s NOT revenue generating or family time on my social media.

I approach it like a puzzle: I have only X amount of time, and Y amount of resources. What can I make happen with that? What worked really well last time? How can I multiple that? What shortcuts can I figure out, using only what I have to hand right now?

I give up Netflix, going out, and a bunch of other things for the designated time until SOMETHING gets done. Then I log out and move on, and I don’t allow myself to think about it again for another 6 or so months. Boom! You’re welcome.

And that’s it. Only, of course, it’s not really… my biggest challenge is the ongoing battle against perfectionism and its evil twin overwhelm. So throughout the process, I steel myself with the reminder that done is always better than perfect. DONE is always better than perfect. Done is ALWAYS better than perfect!

So, it seems I’m due another stint on social. But this time, I thought it might be fun to invite other translators to follow along too. A kind of “social” social spring clean, if you will. (A spring you don’t have to be in the southern hemisphere to enjoy, of course!).

What do you say?

A Social Media Challenge!

Your mission, should you chose to accept it, is to do one thing each day in October that will have an impact on your social presence in the longer term.

Each weekday I’m going to suggest a task to work on for whatever pocket of time you can carve out that day. You can choose to follow my suggestion, adjust it to suit your circumstances, or come up with an alternative – whatever makes most sense for you. Or just dip in and out as it suits.

Follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or here on the blog. Let me know how you’re getting on by using the hashtag #socialtranslator (so I can find you!). If you find it helpful, please give me a thumbs up, a like or a share – that’s how I’ll know you’re finding it useful, and it’ll help other translators join in too.

Remember to keep it simple, avoid overwhelm, and be crystal clear on the impact we want our actions to have in the wider scheme of things. Done is better than perfect!

Our aim is to have a social presence that is sharp, snappy, and self-sustaining by the end of the month.

Or worst case scenario, we’ll have something better than what we started with 🙂

See you on 1 October!

Weighing up translation degrees: two oft-overlooked tips

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Professor LeviSome of the best translators I know don’t have a degree in translation, so they are certainly not a requirement to becoming a translator.

However, an  increasing number of newcomers to the profession are opting to pursue a formal (usually postgraduate) qualification in the field.

So when translator Lloyd Bingham put out the following call a few months back on Twitter, it set me thinking:

What should you keep in mind when weighing up whether a translation degree is for you? [Read more…]

53rd ATA Annual Conference: In Pictures

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I’m just back from the 53rd Annual Conference of the American Translators Association (ATA), which was held in San Diego 24 – 27 October this year. Here is a little conference round-up in images (written report to follow).

In the meantime, check out the conference Twitter feed and associated quotes, links and photos here.